干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Historically, it is believed that fratricide accounts for up to 15% of friendly casualties during operations and a UK MoD report identifies that almost half of all such casualties occur in situations involving ground units only(1).. Such risks can be mitigated, to an extent, via operational awareness and effective communications. However, recent conflicts have involved a much more dynamic, complex and technically sophisticated battlefield than previously experienced. For example.. Operation Telic (Desert Storm) involved almost one million combatants and ten thousand armoured vehicles in the coalition force, advancing across an extensive battlefront at high speed during daylight and at night, making effective use of a range of electro-optic sensors. The accelerated tempo of battle means that front lines can undergo rapid, punctuated advances that can leave individual combat units with a much degraded situational awareness, particularly of where they are in relation to other 'friendly' combatants. Consequently, there is a need for a robust, low cost, low weight, compact, unpowered, interoperable, Combat Identification technique for use with popular electro-optic sensors which can be deployed, and is effective, at the individual combat unit level. In this paper we discuss ground-to-ground combat identification materials that meet these requirements, all of which are based on the air-to-ground Mirage (TM) vehicle marking material(2) We show some preliminary ground-to-ground data collected from the new variant Mirage (TM) material in recent experimental trials conducted during the day, evening and at night.